the timboucher experience

Saw these last night while re-reading the chapter on “Primal Religions” in Huston Smith’s classic, The World’s Religions: Our Great Wisdom Traditions. This first one is from page 367 and he is talking about an Australian Aboriginal tribe, and how when they enter “the Dreaming” they become their legendary figures…

We are inclined to say that when the Arunta go hunting they mime the exploits of the first and archetypal hunter, but this distinguishes them from their archetype too sharply. It is better to say that they enter the mold of their archetype so completely that each becomes the First Hunter; no distinction remains. Similarly for other activities from basket weaving to lovemaking. Only while they are conforming their actions to the model of some archetypal hero do the Arunta feel that they are truly alive, for in these roles they are immortal.

…

We can see from this that aboriginal religion turns not on worship but on identification, a “participation in,” and acting out of, archetypal paradigms.

I like this especially because it very strongly supports what I wrote about how ritual is a way for people to act out the stories which they hold as important. Also, in that same article, I talked about how codified “belief” can freeze or kill the potency of a story. Smith says something very similar in relation to how the Arunta feel about writing (as opposed to their oral tradition)…

To commit living myth and legend to lifeless script, they assume, would be to imprison it and sound its death knell. (p. 368)

Along those lines also is Jung’s definition of a symbol as a “transformer” of psychic energy, and when a symbol becomes attached to a specific definition/meaning, it loses its power. Also, while I’m at it, I may as well toss in a quote I found a while back from Erich Neumann’s The Origins and History of Consciousness, which kind of adds to that first quote, about “becoming” gods.

Originally, consciousness did not possess enough free libido to perform any activity - plowing, harvesting, hunting, waging war, etc - of its own “free will,” and was obliged to invoke the help of the god who “understood” these things. By means of ceremonial invocation, the ego activated the “help of the god” and thus conducted the flow of libido from the unconscious to the conscious system. The progressive development of consciousness assimilates the functional gods, who go on living as qualities and capacities of the conscious individual who plows, harvests, hunts and wages war as and when he pleases. (p. 326)

And this, in turn, ties into autonomous complexes and the polytheistic mind, but I don’t want to dredge that up right now.

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